Dear Jack Kerouac: Reading in Gala Knorr's 'Tumbleweeds'

A few weeks ago, I read Gala Knörr's letters to Jack Kerouac, along with four other artists, for her exhibition 'Tumbleweeds' in Bilbao. We read lively letters in a seance-like performance on Zoom (due to the pandemic), in between jazz played by a live saxophonist. The reading premiered on December 14th on Youtube. (Mine is in English at 36:10 if you're curious.)

"Tumbleweeds' is a project based on the fictitious epistolary relationship that artist Gala Knörr established with her "silent mentor" Jack Kerouac. A mentor whose answers could only be found within his oeuvre. Modelling her writing after Satori in Paris, a cognac infused short novel based on Jack Kerouac's search for his family origins on a ten day trip to Paris and Brest, in which the author alludes to a spiritual awakening, yet finds said 'kick in the eye' in a series of Parisian pilgrimage-like extravagant encounters. Knörr narrates similar anecdotical rendez-vous over a four month period at a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts. Utilizing the figure as the one of a confidant, she invokes Jack's spirit, in a seance like performative activation reading of her letters as if we were in a 'Shakespeare&Co' tea party."  -Nicolas de Ribou/ Gala Knörr

The exhibition is on until January 8, 2021 at Torre de Arriz. Go see it if you're in Bilbao. 

The Pleasures of Hackney Road

This year I wrote and illustrated my first artist book! The Pleasures of Hackney Road: Five Tales of Wildness features drawings and stories about my adventures in London. You can find it at two major contemporary art institutions (The CCCB and La Casa Encendida) and at numerous bookstores. There's also a Spanish edition, Los Placeres de Hackney Road, which is now in its second printing. 

You can write me on Instagram @margofortuny if you would like to order a copy internationally or stock it. 

It's the first in a series of books about different cities I've lived in. What cities do you dream of moving to, if you just move spontaneously?

Holding my book in Madrid

The inside of 'The Pleasures of Hackney Road' by Margo Fortuny

A drawing from 'The Pleasures of Hackney Road' by Margo Fortuny

At El Imparcial in Madrid

At the CCCB bookshop in Barcelona

SUBCULTURE WITH LOVE

THE BED'S TOO BIG WITHOUT YOU

By Margo Fortuny

This is about an artist that started out D.I.Y, as in punk style, drag style, taking snapshots of her friends, documenting their lives: getting dressed up, listening to Lou Reed, getting wasted, fucking, being love-seared, dying, hanging out in New York/ London/ Berlin… The subject matter is often relatable (everyone has glanced longingly across a room, eaten birthday cake, peered in the mirror) and even when you haven’t done what’s depicted, you can FEEL it. The sting of youth, the excitement of experimentation, the disillusion of failed love, the aesthetics of a new city, self-transformation…Nan Goldin archived the feeling.

Snapshot-style photography is something anyone can do, from famous artists like Larry Clark and Wolfgang Tillmans to younger sparks like Ryan McGinley... yet Goldin’s work features a unique pathos. Nan Goldin is a snapshot pioneer, a staggering witness to love stories, addictions, nightlife, death, and the quiet minutes that happen every day. She is a historian to her best beloveds. Frank without being sensational, beautiful without being obvious, and cool without effort, Goldin’s photography touches a nerve. What sets her apart is the striking intimacy portrayed, exemplified in her work “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.”

After studying at the Museum School in Boston, and surviving the suicide of her sister, a young Nan Goldin came to New York in 1978. She was a fan of Caravaggio, Faulkner, Tulsa, Dietrich, Antonioni, and Fassbinder… Back then NYC was punk/ dangerous/ electric with creative fire. In the late 70’s/ early 80’s, Goldin hosted Bowery loft parties popular for the characters in attendance…and the inevitable board games, rolled-up dollar bills, cake, cocktails, and tail-feather shaking. She worked as a waitress at Tin Pan Alley, while pursuing her vocation as a photographer. Goldin was part of the New Wave Life. The era’s parties, pleasures, and achievements were not important. The personal interactions were what mattered. She preserved them. She took pictures at work, out and about, at home, in bed, everywhere.

Goldin was inside the NYC downtown scene, and she documented it. On the topic of Goldin’s contemporaries, Darryl Pickney wrote “This was not the first generation to fall under the spell of the ruinous message that a wild life indicated a fertile imagination, that art was intrinsically progressive, a form of dissent, and that you would have to spend some time in the wilderness because of your daring aesthetic choices…” Goldin captured this 80s New York mood of heady recklessness and creative rebellion, before it burnt out. Many of the people shown in her early slideshows were dead by the 1990s.

As the years passed, Goldin maintained her intimate photography style while getting clean. She expanded her visual repertoire to include daylight, new characters, and more landscapes. The artist continues to create striking portraits and memorialize friends with AIDS. She exhibits internationally, from London’s Tate Gallery to Paris’s Centre George Pompidou to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Rewind a couple decades. In the beginning Goldin was presenting slideshows, usually accompanied by live bands, or homemade mixtapes. She worked the projector at bars and nightclubs, in front of an audience of friends. Her first NYC slide show happened at Frank Zappa’s birthday party at the Mudd Club. These slides, which became the seminal “Ballad of Sexual Dependency,” depicted a portrait of the Lower East Side collective experience, and the human practice of feeling and living and looking into oneself.

“The Ballad of Sexual Dependency” created between 1981 and 1996, is a series of 690 slides, shown over a period of forty-five minutes. The slides form a narrative, dealing with identity formed by gender politics, love, and sexuality. The subjects were her close friends assuming various aspects of themselves: lover, mourner, and social self/private self. Each photograph is taken as a tender glance, presenting imperfect people with such honesty and lack of judgment, thus rendering the subjects loveable and beautiful. At the time, the slideshow was radical. Now it is recognized as fine art. Her work is still relevant, as a window to a specific time and place, as a tool for awareness, and as a candid visual language.

Nan Goldin captures the energy between people.

some poems i dig...

"it is hard to believe
when i'm with you
that there can be anything as still as solemn
as unpleasantly definitive as statuary
when right in front of it
in the warm new york 4 o'clock light we are
drifting back and forth
between eachother
like a tree breathing
through its spectacles"

-frank o'hara, 1960

+++++

"You cannot describe it, you cannot picture it,
You cannot admire it, you cannot sense it.
It is your true self, it has nowhere to hide.
When the world is destroyed, it will not be destroyed."

- probably wumen huikai, around 13th century

+++++

"it isn't gentleness
that you and i are looking for
in the hills and valleys,
it is the cliff, the gorge,
the scraped ocher on the knees
of the slopes
and the red crevice in which the land
shows too, the brilliance of its wound."

-francisco segovia

Painting by Gerhard Richter, oil on board, 1991

+++++

ECSTASY OF CHAOS

"when the immense drugged universe explodes
in a cascade of unendurable colour
and leaves us gasping naked,
this is no more than the ecstasy of chaos:
hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love
which alone, as we know certainly, restores
fragmentation into true being."

-robert graves, 1960s

+++++

"Etoile qui brille
regard humide
fil de la vierge
pitie
flotte au vent
cette compresse sur mon coeur
trop vite trop vite et quel delire
quelque chose vient de se casser
dans la mecanique
de ma vie."

-paul dermee, dadaist

+++++

DEVOTION PROCESS

"It was a crinkled feeling
-a recognition of stiff joy pleating:
a gentle iron stifling discoveries
and nudging calm into the folds.

Hot disquietude burned holes in me
like scorching cloves bearing your name.
Your invisible flames broke my stride
and forced me to decompose in shudders.

Everyday presented that familiar alley,
Where I would wander lost but certain
of my eventual collapse...
I could only turn my head to hide
my pupils screening
the humility of love. "

-m. fortuny

photo by scott payne

+++++

SENSATION

"Par les soirs bleus d'été, j'irai dans les sentiers,
Picoté par les blés, fouler l'herbe menue :
Rêveur, j'en sentirai la fraîcheur à mes pieds.
Je laisserai le vent baigner ma tête nue.

Je ne parlerai pas, je ne penserai rien :
Mais l'amour infini me montera dans l'âme,
Et j'irai loin, bien loin, comme un bohémien,
Par la Nature, -- heureux comme avec une femme."

-arthur rimbaud, 1870